Federico, an architecture student in Palermo, roams the city looking for modern buildings to draw and photograph. In a park, he meets a young man, Borobudur, who opens his eyes to another city. On the trail of this magical boy, Federico abandons his daily life and discovers a transformative metropolis. In an admirable fusion of fiction and documentary and a stunning tutorial on political architecture in which the city speaks in its secret language of horizontal and vertical lines, Borobodur’s hero enters alien territory led by the timeless device of a genie in a bottle. An accomplished work that shifts subtly between black and white and colour to reveal the soul of the city and its inhabitants, this is a chronicle of everyday desires and an awakening to the world, pulsating to the rhythm of lives in perpetual flux.